Short and compact. Say I want to force my taste upon all hub members. ;)I have disallowed any other theme than @BOET's theme to achieve that. But the default scheme is still Hubzilla focus where I want Facebonk.How can I do this?!Hubzilla Support Forum

It's a test. I'd rather just set it for all channels but there's no option for that. Probably for good reason, but I do see usecases such as corporate designs. Besides, I dislike the similarity to f but do like the theme's overall appearance. Really like it.

Well... yai it IS the FB color. Since I am color-blind, I used a color picker to get it right. But just change it - use the default scheme and the advanced design options... you can even use background designs. Though that would only work on channel level and would be the exact opposite of a corporate design approach. The advanced options as such got me to the idea to do a full theme, because one can really customize the whole experience. Although... not many will probably really do that. But I LOVE it!

Oh, btw, I encountered one problem. There is another third party theme called bluebasic, therefore there was no symlink created for yours hence it was already available but pointing to the other theme. I then manually removed the other symlink and manually created one for yours.https://git.librenet.co.za/librenet/ln_hubzilla_themes

Ups... forgive me my ignorance! I wasn't aware about the other Bluebasic... I now think I should find another name for my theme, because the one on libranet clearly came before my version. I should have been doing some research!

You are Hubzilla[rant]This is a first. This is officially my very first rant. It's necessary because I want to welcome all you Hubzillians, young, old, new, already part of the inventory.If you are at Hubzilla and want to be a part, you are. No matter whether your oldest channel is 1 week or 10 years old. You have got your very own and personal experience. If you only sometimes want to add to a discussion, that's fine. If you want to finance our precious devs for the next five years to develop Hubzilla fulltime, that's fine. No need to excuse yourselves for not being here for long or whatever. Just one rule: be thoughtful and friendly.Or, as Auntie Kate says: Don't be mean. Towards nobody. Including yourself.[/rant]Needed to be said.;)

Please, it's not about my rant here, but about the bug. I orinally only wanted to add the URL, but Hubzilla pulled the whole post. In order not to destract from the rant, which has got no place in this forum, I ask you to use the original post for that. HZ obviously pulls the content on the fly.

[rant]This is a first. This is officially my very first rant. It's necessary because I want to welcome all you Hubzillians, young, old, new, already part of the inventory.If you are at Hubzilla and want to be a part, you are. No matter whether your oldest channel is 1 week or 10 years old. You have got your very own and personal experience. If you only sometimes want to add to a discussion, that's fine. If you want to finance our precious devs for the next five years to develop Hubzilla fulltime, that's fine. No need to excuse yourselves for not being here for long or whatever. Just one rule: be thoughtful and friendly.Or, as Auntie Kate says: Don't be mean. Towards nobody. Including yourself.[/rant]Needed to be said.;)

I want to add:You are welcome here. You do not need to be a developer to be cool. You do not need to advertise for Hubzilla to be a part of us. What makes you a part of us is: take part in discussions of any kind. If you have are great at house decoration and tell us about that and how you so it, you will be a first in here (as far as I know) and add valuable content to the hubiverse that might attract others to like it here.There are many ways to be apart of.Chose yours.

I've got tears in my eyes. This is the story of a tiny little toy monkey. A little boy from Berlin had attached it to his bike. That was 80 years ago.When he had to leave Germany and his parents behind in order to survive he took this monkey with him. He went to Sweden. He was safe.Later, as an adult, he migrated ro the USA. Built a lige, a family. The monkey was there. When he was an elder they asked him: maybe he had something he could donate to the Jewish Museum Berlin. He knew he had something, but it was difficult to part with. With much hesitation he finally donated this little toy monkey. It's now on display, touching many hearts with the story it tells.And then there was a young woman from Sweden. She saw the monkey, read the story. Noticed one striking coincidence: her grandparent's story matched his parent's story. Now read for yourself.It's ok if you cry.

I would like to put my strategy of Hubzilla advocacy for discussion. There has been criticism on Wikipedia regarding a link to my news item on prolinux.de. Thank you to @neue medienordnung plus for making me aware of this.To be clear I do receive this as a criticism only partially of the article itself, though that's implicit. The main criticism goes towards linking it. Though I also read it as an implicit criticism of being involved with the project and publishing. I want to stress that I never hid my involvement to the site admin and in order to get this out I proudly added hubzilla.rocks to my profile shortly after the thing was published. I never intended this to be linked, but I will come back to that thought later. My mistake was not to have made that clear towards those who are involved with the article.https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/26494/hubzilla-383-ver%C3%B6ffentlicht.html

Please let me paraphrase the points given I see as discussion worthy before I add my own thoughts. The writer who goes by the nick of "BunchTiredness" has written anonymously, appears to have no Wikipedia account (at least I believe so as their nick links to no profile page but I am not familiar enough with WP) and they seem to be one of us as they write "our project" meaning Hubzilla.

The article is pseudo journalistic as the author (me) even gives hubzilla.rocks as homepage and is running the official project website.

Wouldn't it be better to wait until the project has reached an organically grown relevance?

Such pseudo relevances are harming our project by ridiculing it

OK, here are my thoughts. Pro-Linux.de is a community generated news site that is run by one person who lecors and publishes provided texts. He writes very clearly that everyone is welcome to write as otherwise running this website is not managable on the long term. But I am not hiding that I am affiliated to Hubzilla and very intentionally so. I am proud if it.Upon my intention with writing the news item. Well, it is an often moaned fact that HZ does get little attention. IMO this is because so far there has been little true outside activism. Right now I sense a momentum that this might be changing with quite a few new passionate members. Welcome to you all, I am happy to see you here. But I have been with this project since 2012 when it still was Friendica and I am still very passionate about it. Regarding organically grown relevance, well, there hardly is any. There will be none if we keep on staying inside our bubble.Though yes, I do see it as an error to use this article as a link at Wikipedia. @Sean Tilley is in another league, it's really good while this is more like advertising, yes. But even as I was finally put across the edge to get active by this WP thing and one part was yes, with creating relevance for a WP entry, it's by no means restricted to that. I am working on a much broader scale, my intention is merely to add to the picture so that we will gain momentum and relevance so that it will not need my article (at least not this one) to get the entry.

So please let me put up to discussion what I am setting out to do.

If we as a project will not work together we will achieve nothing.

I want to do my part by writing and trying to get us into the community sites. Write and publish outside of our HZ bubble.

My thoughts are: By doing that we will slowly get more presence. Hopefully others will pick up on our existance ( @Waitman Gobble :) and write something, too. That way we may work our way up to be seen, to spread the idea of Zot.

To be 100% clear: I did not do this to get linked at WP. I see this as a very first step. I believe we are who need to start talking about HZ and Zot. Because no-one else will.

I am planning to do this again, and also for English speaking sites. I have already started preparing something in German and English for HZ 4.0 so that I will have it once we will need it.Plus I am writing a longer introduction to HZ for Pro-Linux.de because it is wanted. They are eager to feature Hubzilla. That can certainly be translated or rewritten to English. I believe we need many voices talking, I want to be one.

But given that criticism I want to put this up to discussion and collect opinions whether I should continue.

@h.ear.t | tobias , I admire you for your passion for the project, the persistence and all your contributions over all these years. I'm only a NEWBE here and don't really think it would make any difference what my opinion is, but anyway, I'm entitled to my own opinion... am I?

I loved your post on the PRO-LINUX site. Because it functions in multiple ways. The most important might be: It gives "us" exposure in niche where the most people might have never even heard of #Hubzilla. And that is not a random-bullshit-mainstream-place, but a page with a serious - albeit semi-professional - mission of spreading "the know" to people who have a certain interest which gets them to visit the page. EXCELLENT!

So what you did actually, in your "official" function as the "manager" of some not so unimportant hubs, was releasing an "official" press information about the most recent status of your operations. That is - IMHO - totally reasonable and normal practice.

Now, I don't have ANY idea how Wikipedia plays it. I don't want to involve myself at all. But I would understand skepticism from "their" end, when operators of whatever service start linking their press releases. That, probably, wasn't the best move. Nobody should blame you for that - and you shouldn't accept any blame. But the next time, I'd have someone else referencing your "press-releases" - just to avoid a potentially wrong/bad impression.

- which is a subsidiary of DPA... and would give "us" even more exposure if you manage to get your stuff into their stream. Also other news-sources like Heise, Internet-World whatever else do appreciate these "small" bits of news just to keep their own news-tickers alive... that costs only a phone-call to the editors for confirmation and won't work just by email - because they hate unsolicited email (aka SPAM) as much as you or I do.

Manage expectations: It won't add another 10.000 users/day, but it would build some "external" reputation. And THAT is really important!

Wikipedia will need to "acknowledge" the relevance sooner or later anyway. I wouldn't focus on that channel, but ALL the others first. Then even a stubborn and half ignorant editor of the "encyclopedia" won't have much of a choice.

I loved the article, and I don't see the conflict of interest, BUT, it would be a good idea to add a disclaimer at the end of your articles, if you want to prevent such silly and in no way constructive commenting by the anonymous WP author.

I think you're doing great work and a great service. Could it be interpreted as "self-serving," yup. Oh well.

I agree with @BOET - while it would be "nice" to get Wonkypedia exposure, eventually, they'll have to acknowledge relevance unless we cease to be relevant.

As to a "vote" - yes you should continue. It is probably appropriate to put info in your bio about your connection to the "official" project hubs - maybe even at some point tell the story of how and why you got involved at that level. What problems does Hubzilla solve for you that aren't solved by other packages? What do you use Hubzilla for and why? In fact, i think it'd be cool if someone (not necessarily you specifically...) created a channel, interviewed both the old guard and the new guard, and posted the interviews or articles derived from those interviews - in a way that was accessible for sharing on other sites.

No, that doesn't "break out of the bubble." But do we really WANT to "break out"? As far as getting the message out - we want others to see and know - but I don't know that we want to "break out" as much as we want to invite others in. But for that, there has to be something there. We've been chasing after the critical mass and the network effect of the social media possibilities - but I think we've really forgotten that Hubzilla is FAR FAR FAR more than that. Maybe we need to work on a few tools - but the platform can replace a butt ton of other disconnected applications that people have employed not only in their personal lives, but in non-profits and in businesses.

So, another approach would be to make Hubzilla THE (or at least A) DESTINATION that other people come to in order to do something (get news and information and discuss things share things, shop? or whatever). That is to say, actually USE IT to do the things that we are trying to tell people they should be using it to do (not just social media - THAT is a bubble i think we DO need to break out of - Hubzilla does SO MUCH MORE than allow us to stand on our soap box and scream into the void and hope someone hears.... IMHO the social media aspects of Hubzilla are "icing on the cake" - Hubzilla can do all that it does AND be the central place for our social media interactions)

If we find a couple specific "use cases" then, it's just a matter of talking about how Hubzilla is actually being used and making things better and easier for people and not a matter of telling people how they COULD use it.

(This isn't directed at you - but more at the larger discussion in case others want to pitch in), I'm becoming more and more convinced that we need to be less and less talking "about" Hubzilla, and more and more using Hubzilla to talk about and accomplish other things - and then we can talk and write and share about those other things far and wide while pointing out all the reasons it wouldn't have been possible (or would have been harder) without Hubzilla.

What people need to see are good examples of real world use cases of how Hubzilla was used to do something awesome or how Hubzilla (or Osada or Zap) made it easier to do the thing - and the thing was really cool. Then people will ask the question, "How did you do that?" And the answer is, "It would have been much more difficult without Hubzilla."

Right now, we don't have any examples like that as far as I know. Hubzilla is more like the flashy and cool but somewhat impractical concept cars of the big auto-shows. People don't drive those. They drive the more "practical" production models.

That's not to say that Hubzilla isn't inherently practical - and it isn't to say that Hubzilla can't be used for production. It just HASN'T BEEN.

In any event, I feel that "we" (though, I'm still a Noob as well, as far as i'm concerned) are very much on a cusp as well. THANK YOU to you @h.ear.t | tobias and EVERYONE who has been passionate about this project and kept it going.

Thank you all, no time now, just want to answer quickly. So I will just go on. I just do not at all want to work against the community. I hope Hubzilla has got quite a career ahead, it just needs our help to get there.

Hey Tobias, sorry was the long day on the road today. I can't be an mistake to publish stuff like you did on pro-linux.de. I read the article and liked it.For the one case of wikipedia it might not match as an arguement for the entry. But I don't bother.Please go ahead...

I want to thank @Alexandre Hannud Abdo for their post below. Please, do watch the video by Stef Sanjati. It's very clearly raw and improvised, but an extremely important voice. What she says is so true and I am also scared for trans people in many other countries that are more and more sliding towards the populist right side, including the one I am living in. Brasilia has a long standing terribly ugly record of anti rainbow violence. There are still quite a few countries who are very anti rainbow and it is almost an unfortunate logical concclusion that if homosexually is deemed a legal offence, trans people will encounter even less compassion. And because this is a subject I feel very passionate about I will also add my comment, which I hope will provide a positive counter-ballance of positivity. Human rights apply to each and everyone of us. They are not up for discussion or to be legislated away. They are universal and undisputable. Everything else is evil and unjust.

My country of birth, Brazil, is already a champion of trans-people killing. And we might end up with a Trump-like government soon, so this kind of shit will hit even worse over there.

And this is my comment that I want to re-share with you in celebration of trans awareness week:

Thank you, thank you, thank you, great to post this.

Right now we are having trans awareness week, which is to celebrate the great diversity and many facettes of what it means to be trans. This week culminates in Transgender Day Of Rememberance, the day to remember those we lost to a hostile, passive or acti e aggressive environment or even near(est) relatives. We must not forget that trans people are actually that, first and foremost, people who just want to live their life and be as happy as possible.As so often great opression provokes activism, and in this case quite often activism that not only fight but also promotes respect, exchange and communication.Therefore I want to do a shout out to some of those trans activists who especially impress me, who alltogether discourage community in-fighting but intersectional and interdisciplanary communication and action.

Kate BornsteinThe true trailblaser. The title of Auntie Kate's autobiography says it all: "A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology, and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today".Other highly important books by them are: "Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us" and "Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws"She has got an awesome talent to make you laugh, to make you cry, to let you feel loved. Seldom have I ever experienced this much warmth in a public figure.

Charlotte Von MahlsdorfShe was so geeky, warm, strange, couragous, kind hearted it warms my heart. I have never met her, but at the SMU (Gay* Museum Berlin) they have a bust. Each time I see it, my heart jumps a bit. It's so lifely, looks so endearingly friendly.(Do read her autobiography "I Am My Own Wife", do avoid the theatre play that does put some perceived negative aspects of her out of historical context and does paint a wrong picture of her. There are people who did actually take the effort to research the source documents and there seems to be no evidence for the warped portrait that play paints of her and due to it's success dominates and modifies how she is seen and perceived for many audiences.)

Lilli ElbeRespect to the elders, and she is one of the first persons who underwent reassignment surgery. The great Magnus Hirschfeld also saw her. And yes, I have read her autobiography and no, I can recommend neither the novel, nor the movie. The author took too many liberties. He said he never set out to write a factious book, but I'd rather he had then not based his story on real persons. Especially due to the movie their legacy and rememberance is tainted or even outright wrong.

Buck AngelHe's da man with the pussy. I love his warmth, his resilience with which he is often able to answer hostility with acknowledgement and openness. He does speak his mind, and is the first to admit that he sometimes too goes into a wrong direction. I admire his ability to answer hate with love and warmth, this is a rare gift.

Sally GoldnerAnother trailblazer with Transgender Victoria, Bisexual alliance Victoria and radio host on Melbourne's radical community radio 3CR, talking her mind weekly in "Out Of The Pan". She is a very sharp mind, a voice to be listened to and to consider.

Jazz JenningsI just love her courage and dedication. Since her very first TV appearance when she was a fierce little girl until today when she is a fierce young adult who is so vibrant and in many ways puts herself out there as an example, an advocate and a bridge builder. I am very excited to watch her public persona grow and develop.

Michelle Shepard "Mama Mich"She is just georgous and went a breathtaking alley from when she opened her landmark trans radio show "Transpositions" on JOY 94.9 the LGBTIQ radio from Melbourne. She is very open with herself so that others don't have to. She became a professional speaker, doing seminars on diversity and inclusion for companies and superseeded Transpositions which was more of an explainer show with the JOY podcast "Trans POV" where trans people get to talk their own view on the world. She is just starting a new professional advocacy chapter in her life, I am excited where it will lead her.

Transgender Awareness Week, typically observed the second week of November, is a one-week celebration leading up to Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), which memorializes victims of transphobic violence.[1] TDOR occurs annually on November 20, when transgender advocates raise awareness of the transgender community through education and advocacy ...

This stems from a discussion about the ability to follow #hashtags like on #Diaspora*. Both, #Hubzilla and #Diaspora* have got quite a different approach to #hashtags. on #Diaspora* they are a tool to find new content, you can follow them, they are collected by relay hosts. This is a kind of host #Hubzilla does not know, #hashtags are a means to sort site-wide content. Every post you are allowed to see that the hub you are on knows, is shown. Not more, not less. Therefore following #hashtags is not a thing in #Hubzilla..Another sorting tool on #Hubzilla are post #categories. These only live on your own channel, and there are different collections of #categories. One for your home, then one for cards, articles ... They are very much restricted as on for example #Wordpress. Think #blog #categories. They are a kind of thematic navigation for your channel home.What I have learned now is that #Diaspora* uses indexing servers to collect and relay their #hashtags. #Hubzilla directory servers do not collect content but just create a kind of #toc for the hubzillaverse by collecting basic channel descriptions. I think they are also involved with routing (public) messages. Non-public nessages have known addressees. But you can configure which directory server to use and you can always keep your channel off the grid. Or your hub.Ok. Now #readon.

Because you have to find them all. Content relays collect and store all content on the network (or at least all the sites which opt-in). Then subscribers subscribe to tags from that content and these tagged messages are relayed to all of them. These central nodes are ripe for the picking. Facebook doesn't need to run a fediverse service and deal with all the users. They only need to run a relay and they've got all the public content on the network.

Friendica's approach is different - sort of. All sites can be tag relays, but you still have to find all sites serving the '#foo' tag so that you can follow them all. Interestingly, Friendica sites scan everything that happens in the fediverse and probe every single site to find out what it is and what it does - and whether you like it or not. Even private and off-grid sites are added to the statistics. I've actually installed Friendica "counter-measures" on some of my own (private) sites to block this activity. It's gotten to the point that it's creepy. I'm not saying Friendica has become unethical, but what this provides is a blueprint for how a Google-like service could hoover up the entire fediverse.

Anyway this trend is probably unstoppable because people want all of the benefits of a large provider in a decentralised service. Some of these are pretty far down the slippery slope and you may wake up one day to find we've created exactly the thing we tried to escape. I understand the desire and realise that it may be inevitable, but I have to put a stake in the ground in the places where I see a conflict with my own ethics.

To be fair, Hubzilla has centralised directory services. I've tried to create these ethically and restrict the information they consume and give people the permission controls to hide their profile details from these entities if they desire.

Eventually there is going to be a fediverse-wide directory and it won't have any access controls because few services have implemented a working permission/rights framework. I'm already regretting playing a part in helping to make this possible. When it happens, most of you will forget or never even be aware that we once provided a way to do this in a way we thought was ethical.

Yes, I tried to hold the news item but they published it anyway. The link to the git repo went missing too, as did my name which I had provided in addition to my website nick and would have preferred to see up there even though I love that nick. It's very me. But attaching a real person as was my intent would probably increase visibility and credibility.My own mistake was not providing a screenshot. I take that blame.But I want to stress that the contact had been very nice and friendly and this site too is a community effort by one person. Totally hats off.This was my first venture into this, it won't be my last. And I have learned from it.

I seem to have a massive problem on the server, one of my mail accounts started receiving spammails from my own server. I think I could narrow it down to that server.I have turned all hubs off but will not be able to do anything else before tomorrow afternoon. I have already spent half of my night with this shit and will need to go to work for early shift anyway.BTW start.hubzilla.org also has got accounts from our new spammy friends. I will do a cleanup as far as I can before that hub returns. Project will be back earlier I think. What's more is this is veeery bad timing.

VERY sorry for this but I really need to go to sleep now. Bad news. Very sad.

Thanks for your hard work Tobias. Don't let this trouble your ☮️. And let us know if you'd like a hand. This is not that bad nor that sad. Worse things happen every hour in any city around the world. I'm wishing you a good (half-)night of sleep. Abraços

Hi, is there any forum for hub administrators to coordinate fight against spam? Recently I've noticed at least two spammers (both of them blocked on my hub now) one a certain Chris Greenwalty, promoting his shady dissertation site, the other one is about a field engineer website. Both take a considerable amount of listing in the global directory, which cannot be a good idea for new users looking for contacts.

So there might be a need to discuss such global issues - even if every hub admin is free to elect to block spammers or not..

While the circumstances are not ideal, this is not such a terrible thing. Hubzilla Start has always been advertised as a "starting point" for those looking to experience the decentralized social web. Unlike other social networking projects offering similar public servers, people with accounts on Hubzilla Start have the option to clone their identities and migrate to other hubs. They actually own the channel given to them for free.

i prefer using the option to import a channel online when signing up with a new hub. it's less fuss, no down- and uploading of files, and the channel that serves as backup is automatically synchronized all the time. a file backup would have to be repeated over & over again to keep it up-to-date.

I have just started the server again, I think I can rule out that this server was causing the issues. Still need to investigate though. And we really need the server up right now for other reasons.Very bad timing all this.

i prefer using the option to import a channel online when signing up with a new hub

I agree, that is a convenient option when available. But there is also a possibility that the hub you are migrating from or cloning from is not online. Perhaps it goes offline permanently. If you download your identity data, you can still migrate.

I always say: if you download at least your channel data you can even delete al your clones 100% and disappear completely. After one year or when you feel like it you could re-create a channel from your data, which still has got your old config and is connected to the same channels. Continue from where you left off.

More seriously, have recently thought it might be useful to create an automatable process for backing up your ID. Something like a special webdav folder or the likes where the json gets saved to automatically ao that you could establish a local regular cronjob or task solution to have it downloaded. Emailed as an attachment protected by a configurable password. Something like that.

Ok. One final verdict on this issue: I am very happy to state that I now have prove that none of my servers, and certainly not hubzilla.org has been the source. The email account of mine which has got problems has been in some data theft collections. Luckily it's an email I am phasing out anyway. It's very old and I had almost forgotten about it, checked it only veeery rarely. Coincidentally I have witnessed yesterday how the abuse started, at least that was the begin of massive batches of returned emails to a vast range of receipients. That was lucky. I have now deactivated it. One little joy is that there's now one bot spitting out mails towards an smtp that does not exist. Must be frustrating. In this case I allow myself a bit of Schadenfreude.

Ok, I need to add one more thing. @neue medienordnung plus has found that email notifications were not working on the server. As I did receive emails this went unnoticed. The reason is during my investigations I changed the mail server's config to use another relay host and made a mistake. The thing is, I did not notice as my mail account is located on that server, therefore it did not have to relay but just deliver.Evil trap!But I hear and see that this has now been corrected. In case anyone knows someone who wanted to register at start.hubzilla.net and never received the activation email, please reach out.

We have seen that. Same dilemma as every year. Nearing the year's end they notice that there is surprising little budget left, and therefore they hastily attempt to save some money.Then you may experience things like this: View temporarily out of order.Just a few days later the spending cuts have already been loosened a bit.

The one minute silence to commemorate tragic events is a powerful tradition to express sorrow and to unite within that sorrow, even if it is just for one minute. Have you ever thought about where it does come from? When 9/11 happened I was an intern at the IT section of a local education authority. The day after the event we all came together for one minute silence. This still resonates with me today. Even though afterwards we all continued with our work, this moment was important. Obviously more important than I understood at the time, as I still do remember it. Actually it is one of the most vivid memories I have of that internship. This episode of the Australian radio station ABC Radio National explores the history and yes, the possible origin of the one minute silence. It's surprising that it can quite possibly be traced back to one newspaper article and therefore to one journalist. In addition to being an informative listen, again I really enjoyed the way this episode is built. It very skillfully includes field recordings of silences, which really pulled me in and made for quite an immersive listening experience. A very artful combination of information, interviews and purposeful integration of noise, music and silence. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-history-listen/let-silent-contemplation-be-your-offering/10442278

Good morning.This appears to become my earworm of the day. Loved it back when it was new, but I have never seen the video. Until now. The hearfelt story of an office chair that escapes it's office and ventures off into freedom. Wow, love it.

when i'm not here i'll be on the sundeckam I am I am Ior at the solariumor at the radarwhen i'm not here i'll be on the sundeckam I am I am Ior at the aquariumam I am I am Iand everything that is lasts for three secondsone for before, one for after and one right in the middlefor where the glacier's calvingand where the seconds flie into the blue sea

Just a quick update - I've got a Zap channel connected with a Hubzilla/Red channel over Zot6. I haven't started posting anything yet (this is certain to take a few more days to sort out the conflicts), but they're friends. They've discovered each other and assigned permissions to each other and received and stored them successfully. The cryptography is working.

"It's alive!"

It's Friday night here. The beer is cold. It took a lot of work to get to this point. For right now I'm going to quit while I'm ahead and savour the moment.

!Hubzilla Support ForumIs there currently a workaround for updating for non-shell access webhosting solutions? I just had seen a lifely and priductive discussions about how to proceed in such a case. The scenario is: there really is an awesome provider that lets customers setup a Hubzilla instance automatically and without root access. The drawback: obviously no addons, no way to add anything or to update etc. I know there has been a discussion regarding this recently, but I want to make a point that this is a scenario where webadmins have to be able to admin their hub exclusively from the web console.There may be workarounds, such as the old way of creating an addons folder and manually placing the diles there via ftp. Though I watch that this is difficult to communicate as a necassity and I see this might lead to maintenance hell.

I am NOT REQUESTING this to be done NOW, I see this as a possible option for a feature request for when the Zot6 migration has finished and dev things become stable again. My aim is just to restart the discussion around the necessity. I want to see Hubzilla enter mainstream *dream* and the feedback I see is that we might need that.

I think you can install/update addon repositories directly from the /admin/addons/ section of Hubzilla. If you have access to cron, then running ./util/udall on a schedule may work for updating.

To start the discussion, I'd love to see Hubzilla become mainstream. However, the more complex the software, the more support the hosting provider has to offer. So many apps/cms either require, or benefit from shell access, that not having it is a significant limitation. It's not just Hubzilla that needs it. Off the top of my head, Nextcloud/ownCloud, WordPress, Drupal, Magento, TT-RSS, anything on Node.js all require or benefit from having shell access. It's long past time that hosting providers should provide shell access by default. Just my two cents :)

We're about to launch into a heavy construction phase of the Red project (which will directly impact the Hubzilla project). I'm sending this post to folks connected with the Hubzilla project as a heads up. What you will ultimately come to know as Hubzilla 4.0 is being worked on right now and involves hundreds of thousands of lines of changed code from the current Hubzilla releases.

What this means to you

If you have a site which is running the Hubzilla 'dev' code branch and you are not a developer or you are running a production hub on development code, STOP any automatic updates NOW. Do not update again until the next RC (release candidate). Stability will not return for another month or two. Things are going to break. I cannot stop integrating code to deal with broken stuff on your site. If you can't troubleshoot and fix it, you should not be running 'dev' code. We've had a relatively stable 'dev' code tree for a few years and many people have gotten complacent that any issues could be fixed easily and quickly - and this is about to change in a big way.

What's happening

Hubzilla's underlying protocol 'zot' is about to receive its largest update since 2012. The latest release is Zot6. This affects Hubzilla in literally thousands of ways. There are a number of current features and behaviours which have changed or are no longer available in Zot6.

Diaspora is completely incompatible with Zot6. We will do everything in our power to preserve connectivity to that network, even though at this time I don't have a solution for how exactly to accomplish this. Diaspora is incompatible with ActivityStreams and Zot6 is built on ActivityStreams. Don't fret. It's not going away. I'm somewhat confident that we'll find a compatibility solution in the next month or two, although it's very likely it won't be very efficient. Since Diaspora actually doesn't federate with anything (other projects federate with it), it will be on us to find a workable solution.

Mail. Zot6 does not support 'mail' as a separate messaging system. Private messages are sent as private messages, not as 'mail'. We will do our best to create an interface to display these separately from your normal stream. Some will be surprised at this decision since I have fought it vehemently for years, but the simple truth is that mail as an interface has always gotten the short end of the stick and always falls behind the social stream in innovation and features and upgrades. Zot6 privacy is respectable and very well tested.

Reshares. In Zot6 as in many other networks, reshares are single click activities (much the same as a 'Like'). In older zot implementations a reshare is an embed of another post into your own post and commentary is permitted. It isn't clear yet how to resolve this discrepancy. We will be favouring the popular implementation over the older Hubzilla implementation, but we haven't yet decided how or if to migrate existing content. This is where other developers might have a chance to show their stuff. It's not much different than the email choice to "forward inline" vs. "forward as attachment". It would be nice to offer a choice, but I won't sugar coat it - it would be a fair chunk of work.

Permissions. In Hubzilla we reworked the entire permission system a year or two ago to make it more extensible. That was a major improvement, but it wasn't quite enough. Zot6 has a newer permission system that is much more flexible. As of this moment, we could go either way - keep the old one or move everything to the new one. I'm tempted to move everything forward, but this could delay the completion of the zot6 integration by a few weeks. At this moment, I'm saving that decision until I see how the rest of the migration goes. If we lose a month dealing with Diaspora quirks, I probably won't be able to update the permissions and we'll have to put that off until a later release.

Object encoding. The way post meta-information is encoded on disk in Hubzilla (an older variant of ActivityStreams) isn't compatible with ActivityStreams-JSON-LD which zot6 uses. Several metadata field names are different. Migrating existing content could take months to code and test and will most certainly involve up to several days of downtime on large sites, so this will not happen. We'll continue to store this metadata in the current format and translate it to the new format on the fly when required.